Here is the exact way you will instantly become stronger in the gym…

To get stronger in any workout, you will warm up your biggest muscle groups at the very beginning of your workout.

Remember:

The biggest muscle group in the upper body are the traps.

The biggest muscle group in the lower body are the glutes.

Before your upper body workout you will warm-up your traps.

Let's say you want to do a big chest workout and you want to break your bench press personal record. Let's say you plan to do 4 sets of flat bench press, 4 sets of incline bench press, and 4 sets of dumbbell flies.

Normally you would go to the gym and jump on the bench press, ignoring the other muscles in the upper body. You might be strong, but you absolutely will not be your strongest.

Without the strongest and seemingly invisible muscles trained and activated, it just isn't possible to be your strongest.

Here is what you do to activate your total upper body strength…

Before any big upper body workout that you want to be stronger for, start your workout with 4-6 sets of behind the back barbell shrugs.

Behind the back barbell shrugs are the best exercise for the traps.

After 4-6 sets of behind the back barbell shrugs, your traps will be strong and pumped, your strength will be activated, and you will be stronger in all of your other lifts.

Try it for yourself, next time you want to up your bench press number, do behind the back barbell shrugs first thing in the gym. Start with the empty bar to warmup, then do 4 sets with increasing weight.

For example: 135 lbs, 165 lbs, 195 lbs, 225 lbs. Focus on getting a full range of motion and warming up the entire trapezius muscle.

Then move on to your bench press and you will be amazed at how strong you actually are now that your biggest muscle groups are activated.

How to perform behind the back barbell shrugs

In this video starting at 5:25, Lee Haney will show you how to correctly perform behind the back barbell shrugs.

Before your lower body workout you will warm-up your glutes.

A normal lower body work would look like this: 4 sets of squats, 4 sets of leg press, 4 sets of leg extensions, and 4 sets of leg curls.

Where is the glute training in there? Nowhere to be found.

Glute training is almost never done but if you want to instantly be stronger for your lower body workout, this is what you will do…

With pumped glutes you will be instantly stronger for any lower body lift.

I have found barbell hip thrusts to be the #1 way to stimulate and pump up the glutes. You will want to go a little heavy on this lift because the glutes are so big that light weights will do nothing for them.

I will do my barbell glute thrusts like this:

1st set – 135 lbs, 15 reps

2nd set – 225 lbs, 12 reps

3rd & 4th set – 315 lbs, 10-12 reps

After 4 sets of barbell hip thrusts at a mildly heavy weight I am perfectly ready for any other lower body exercise. After the glutes are pumped, all other weight just seems easy.

If 315 lb squats were hard before warming up my glutes, they are now easy with the biggest muscles in the lower body pumped.

The Science of Strength Activation

The science of strength is very simple: to be stronger, warm up the largest muscle groups in your body.

Rather than focusing on small groups like bis, tris calves and deltoids, focus on the big ones first.

With the big muscles pumped, the small muscles instantly become stronger and can handle heavier weights with greater ease.

It can be a real pain adding all of the weight to the bar to perform behind the back shrugs and barbell hip thrusts.

But you know what they say: No pain = no gain.

Yes, it can be annoying to set up the lifts but the rewards of your newfound strength will far outweigh any mild annoyance.

Remember, it is not necessary to activate your strength before ALL of your workouts.

But…

If you're doing a heavy strength workout and want to be at your absolute strongest, you absolutely need to activate your strength at the beginning or your training session.

After you try it and see for yourself how strong you become, you will never go back.

Guaranteed!

Happy lifting and have a nice day.

-Victor Pride

PS – For more undiscovered fitness tips, including the secret of working out hard and not getting sore, and many great unknown exercises, check out Body of a Spartan. If you're a real hard-core gym rat, you will love it. If you're not a hard-core gym rat but want to be, you will love it too.

Comments

This is pure gold here. I have always done A big compound move before the days training for a 3×3 type thing or the way you show in Body of a Spartan but this is even better. It tacks on perfectly to what is already there. I will implement this for myself and my clients beginning at noon! Thank you so much for your service here.

Hey Vic, I love you’re articles and the workout guide that you made, but I did have a question to your last part about not doing this before every workout. I have for the past few weeks been following your advanced workout for body of a Spartan and want to continue working out every day. Which days based off that template should I be doing these exercises to warm up or just do them every single day? Love your stuff man and thanks for everything you’ve done so far. Happy holidays

You can’t do the same thing all the time, you have to constantly change your workouts every 3-4 weeks. You could do a full body workout every day for a few weeks but eventually your body would get used to it and you would regress. It’s called the law of accommodation. Always do the same workout = get worse.

If its instant strength activation you’re looking for, you are spot on with the glutes. The other muscle group you should focus on is your abs. While performing any lift, contracting the abs during the lift will increase your strength by up to 30%. Meaning the muscle group you are working will contract up to 30% harder while bracing your abs (as if you braced for a punch to the gut). Flexing both the abs and glutes while lifting is ideal.

There’s a lot of science behind it. If you’re interested in the details then shoot me an email, but getting right to the point: just try it. I guarantee you’ll feel a difference.

This article ended BIG for your 30 days of Blogging! Excellent article Uncle Vic and thank you for everything that you share on Bold and Determined. Matt Marshall introduced me to this website in 2010, and I’m still here to this day! Appreciate you Unc.

Victor,
Your site helped me immensely when I was growing up, and you were the reason I got in the gym in the first place! 6 years later here I am at an elite level of strength (not a powerlifter just enjoy strength training) and even I didn’t know about these tricks! I tried this out before squats and it worked just like you said it would.
Thank you for the invaluable info.

Oh I forgot about behind the back barbell shrugs. I have been doing regular dumbbell and barbell shrugs from time to time, as well as dumbbell farmer’s walks. I’ll add the exercises you mentioned to my routine. Thanks a bunch for sharing!